Dear Data Two | Week 5: Things We Buy

Week 5 of Dear Data Two was pretty straight forward, but took a bit of data blending to make it work. I had two goals for this week:

1. Track every purchase that I make
2. Categorize each purchase by the type of goods
3. Locations each place where I made a purchase

Precise times were taken from purchase receipts, along with the categorisations. I then recorded the locations of each place by Swarm check-in, which were uploaded to a Google Sheet via IFTTT. I downloaded both sets of data into excel and manually joined them (there were only 19 records so it wasn’t much effort to do manually).

I then explored the data in Tableau, to see what stories I could find, if any. This week took me longer than I was expecting, mostly because I was having trouble finding anything interesting in the data. The one point that stuck out the most is that I spent more on ice cream than Mother’s Day. Oops! Please don’t tell my mom.